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There are 11 lists in Wales. The others besides us are: Labour, Tory, Liberal, Plaid Cymru, Green, UKIP, BNP, No2EU, SLP and "Britain First" (sounds like a BNP breakaway, anyway another nasty party, whose slogan is "Remember Lee Rigby"). Curiously, none of the candidates of the Scargill Labour Party come from the ex- mining valleys of South Wales, 3 are from North Wales and one from West Wales.
We now know who we're up against. Nominations closed at 4pm and the Returning Officer has just published the list of the parties standing. There are 15 (same as last time, in 2009).Apart from the usual suspects (Tories, Labour, Liberal, Green, UKIP, BNP), there's the Christians Peoples Party, the English Democrats, the Peace Party and the Roman Party (a joke party) who stood last time. New are the Harmony Party, Your Voice, Liberty Great Britain (real "revolutionary" fascists) and "An Independence for Europe" list (rumoured to be a Tory party dirty trick to draw votes from UKIP as they did once before when they put up a "Literal Democrat" candidate).Unlike last time there is no Scargill Labour Party or No2EU list. Which means that we are the only list using the word "socialist", i.e no jokes about the Peoples Front for Judea and the Judean People's Front.
After all, Lenin and the Bolsheviks did completely uproot and destroy semi-feudal Tsarism. Which can't have been a bad thing. A bit like Cromwell here. Nothing to do with socialism, either of them, of course but with clearing the way for the progress of capitalism.
The nomination papers for our list in Wales have just been accepted. So we're off and en route for our first party election broadcast.
Apparently, this new party, based in Petersfield in Hampshire, will be standing in the South East Region:http://yourvoiceparty.org.uk/Can't work out what they stand for if anything. Anybody know?
There is state monopoly capitalism and state monopoly capitalism. It depends where you put the hyphen. State monopoly-capitalism is what the various CPs of the world (whether pro-Moscow or pro-Peking in the olden days) say modern capitalism is. In fact the use of the term is a way of identifying them from an article or a leaflet. State-monopoly capitalism, on the other hand, is what (we say) they stand for.
Actually, it's the person who runs this site:http://bataillesocialiste.wordpress.com/which has a section on "l'impossiblisme anglo-saxon":http://bataillesocialiste.wordpress.com/limpossibilisme-anglo-saxon/which (scroll down) has articles in French, English, Spanish and Italian from us, the Socialist Party of Canada and the Deleonist SLP of America.
There's another blatant, and even cruder, example of Militant's workers-can't-buy-back underconsumptionism here:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/events-and-announcements/lse-marxist-society-debate-lse-hayek-society
The first 8 minutes of Booth's opening are not too bad as a demolition of the "free market" argument but from then on it's downhill all the way. In the following 4 minutes he outlines a crude underconsumption (which he calls "overproduction") theory of capitalist crises: the workers can't buy back all they produce; production was only sustained over the past 30 or so years workers being given credit to buy things; this came to an end in 2008; hence the current crisis.No wonder he has argued elsewhere that capitalism has now entered a period of "permanent slump":
Quote:The use of credit to artificially maintain demand and avoid a crisis is a symptom of the contradictions of capitalism itself: primarily the contradiction of overproduction, due to the nature of capitalism as a system whereby production is in private hands and is only for profit, which means that – since profit is nothing but the unpaid labour of the working class – the working class (as a whole) can never afford to buy back (with wages alone) all that they produce.The current crisis is a reflection of this contradiction unravelling itself on a global scale. All the chickens have come home to roost for the capitalists, and now they –and society as a whole – are faced with an organic crisis of capitalism and a new normality.In fact since it's a permanent feature of capitalism that "the working class (as a whole) can never buy back (with wages alone) all that they produce" on this argument capitalism ought always to have been in a state of permanent stagnation or even not have been able to come into existence.The fallacy of course is that paying demand is not made up just of workers' wages, but also of capitalists' profits. In other words, what the workers can't buy the capitalists can, especially on investment, or buying things to continue and expand production; there is no permanent underconsumption built into capitalism. Put very simply, crises occur when capitalists don't spend/invest because the prospect of making a profit has fallen or disappeared.Booth's theory of crisis is a disgrace to Marxism, but then we have always known that Militant were wrong on this.
Oui, c'est Harry Baldwin. The other is Jim D'Arcy, in 1983. Not seen that photo before. Don't know whether Stuart will be flattered or embarrassed.
Interesting article here in the Weekly Worker making the point that No2EU, although still nominally supported by SPEW (probably only to get money from RMT to finance TUSC), is essentially now a CPB front. It is also standing in Wales where its list is headed by the CPB's General Secretary, Robert Griffiths.
